Doctor Destiny
by NightWarrior
Summary: In which our heroes encounter Doctor Destiny, master of dreams...and come face to face with their literal worst nightmares, along with Mammoth and Killer Moth, who've been forced into serving the Doctor. Slight crossover with JLU. Pairings eventually.
1. Prologue: Threats

Disclaimer: As there are no OC's in this, I own nothing.

TTT

Mammoth ran for his life through the long prairie grass. Behind him, the hunters charged forward, hooting and hollering, waving flint-tipped javelins and crude axes. Some of them had torches that filled the moonless night with harsh, flickering light and greasy smoke. Mammoth's huge feet pounded faster and faster as his massive body plowed through the tall grass...then stopped in abrupt desperation.

They'd driven him to the edge of a cliff.

The beast from which he'd taken his name would have fled the weapons and fire in mindless terror, only to fall into the trap, plunging over the edge to die in the fall...or worse, lie there broken and helpless as the butchers closed in with axes held high.

Snarling, he turned to fight.

The hunters advanced to within a hundred feet, then stopped as the men with javelins padded forward. Those men reared back, arching the weapons high, then cast, and a deadly rain of wood and stone whistled through the night. A javelin bit into Mammoth's side, and he screamed as his blood gushed black in the light of stars and torches.

He hunkered down and charged, roaring. The javelin-throwers skipped to one side in an obviously-drilled maneuver and hurled another volley. Another javelin bit into his gut, and a third buried itself in his shoulder. He staggered, but kept barrelling forward.

The axemen ran to meet him.

The first one died almost instantly, as a massive hand lashed out, grabbed him by the head, and squeezed with enough force to crush his skull. Mammoth tossed the corpse into another man, knocking him over. Howling in fury, the massive metahuman snagged a third hunter by one arm and whipped him around as a crude flail, battering him against two others until the man's arm came off.

But size and strength only avail so much against overwhelming numbers. The javelin-men charged into the fight, wielding their short spears. A long flint tip punched into one kidney. As Mammoth whirled to tear the man's head from his shoulders, an axe bit into his right tricep, crippling his dominant arm. He smashed that axeman across the face with a vicious left hook, breaking the hunter's neck. And that gave two more men their chances. Their axes tore into Mammoth's hamstrings in a coordinated assault, and the metahuman staggered, wobbled...fell. It was all over very quickly after that.

Or at least it **should** have been.

Horribly, though axes hacked his limbs from his body and javelins pierced all his vital organs half a dozen times, Mammoth did not die. His blood-choked screams rang over the prairie as the butchery continued.

The scene slowed, stopped. Mammoth lay slumped on the ground, limbless and bleeding. An axe hung frozen in the air above his torso. His eyes still moved, still held awareness, and they focused on a pair of blue boots that padded into view. The suffering man looked up to see a skeleton dressed in a bright blue robe, leering down at him.

"I am Destiny. **Doctor** Destiny. Master of dreams. You agree to serve me as my bodyguard and general assistant, and I'll relax my powers and release you from this charming nightmare of yours. Or you can say no...and I'll tighten my grip, which means you live this hell for the rest of your days...which won't be long."

He couldn't speak through the bubbling froth of blood in his dream-self's lungs, but Mammoth managed to frantically nod his head 'Yes.'

TTT

Soft footsteps woke Killer Moth from a sound slumber. He cocked one enhanced ear, then stiffened. The footsteps were too heavy to be his daughter Kitten's. Slowly and silently, the mad geneticist pulled his metal mask from the bedside table and slid it on, then grabbed his laser whip from its place next to the mask. He slipped out from under the covers and moved ghost-like down the hall to his daughter's room. Moth crept into Kitten's room to see a man standing next her bed, looking down at the girl. The man was tall, but had a perfectly average face, and perfectly average brown hair. You could walk right past him on the street and never notice.

Moth's laser whip hissed into crackling life as he pressed the power button in the handle.

The intruder calmly responded to the unspoken threat. "Good evening, Mr. Moth."

Killer Moth hissed, "Who the hell are you?!" His eyes snapped to Kitten. She appeared to be unharmed, just curled up in the fetal position, sleeping like a log.

"The name's Destiny. **Doctor** Destiny. Master of dreams. And you will serve me."

"I am no man's puppet! Get out of my house and away from my daughter!"

"That last will be easy enough -- not hard to avoid a corpse."

"_**WHAT?!**_" The harsh snarl in Moth's metallic voice should have woken anything within a hundred feet. Kitten just whimpered and curled up a little tighter. "What did you do to her?!'

Destiny smiled slowly. "Say instead, 'what _will_ I do to her?' I'm surprised it took you this long to realize that all the shouting isn't waking her. Master of dreams, remember? That's _other people's _dreams. If you don't accept my offer, I'll put your _precious_ daughter's tiny dreaming mind through her own personal hell -- being scarred, disfigured, and finally skinned alive by her 'Robbie-Poo.' She'll be insane within a day, and dead by the next."

Killer Moth's fists clenched, and he started to raise his laser whip.

"Don't even think about it. By the time you strike, I'll have already started the dream -- and I don't need to constantly maintain it. And if you kill me, there'll be nobody capable of reversing it. The same goes if you betray me...after all, even if you tell her what's waiting for her, she has to sleep _sometime_."

"God damn you..." The whip hissed as he shut off its power. "What do you want from me?"

"You're a geneticist. I want you to develop something -- a hormone, extra tissue, I don't care what, exactly-- to increase the size of my brain and enhance my powers. Not too much, or it might become a curse instead of a blessing. I want just enough extra power that I can affect normal people in close proximity, whether they're awake or not, and no matter how strong-willed they are. And I want the power to work fast. I'm not exactly a good fighter, so I need a way to put my enemies under within a minute or so. That wretched Batman brought me down, but with the enhancement I want you to make, I'll take him down, then destroy the rest of the Justice League!"

Moth growled, "I work with _insects_! The only human test I've done was the one that gave me enhanced hearing, and even that was just an extension of my research!"

"Then I suggest you learn how to operate on human subjects...and quickly."


	2. Bad News Over Breakfast

Morning in Titans' Tower. Breakfast.

With all the attendant fighting that entailed.

"You got tofu on my sausage!"

"You got sausage in my tofu!"

Robin restrained the urge to bang his head against the table, and muttered, "Do those two realize they sound like a commercial?" Raven raised an eyebrow. "What do you think?" The Boy Wonder just groaned and took another spoonful of his oatmeal, wishing Starfire wasn't sleeping late. She could have helped separate them.

The main viewscreen flaring into life came as a welcome relief. Especially considering that the masked face there was one Robin hadn't seen since he left Gotham for Jump City.

"Batman!"

"Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, but..." He caught sight of Beast Boy and Cyborg struggling in the background. "You two idiots, stop that! This is important!" They stopped. After all, it wasn't every morning they got yelled at by the Caped Crusader. "There's trouble headed your way."

Robin winced. _Oh, hell. It's got to be something really bad._ "What is it?"

"Doctor Destiny's broken out of prison. And since I put him there, he's probably going to go after you to get at me."

_Oh (expletive deleted)! _The Boy Wonder spun completely around in his chair, stark terror all over his face. "Raven, go wake up Starfire!" Robin's expression was enough that Raven didn't ask questions, just floated upward and phased through the ceiling.

"Wait, wait, wait! Hold on a second. Who's Doctor Destiny? What's Robin spazzing about?" This came from Cyborg, who (like all the other Titans besides Robin) had never heard of him.

Batman and Robin spoke in unison, "John Dee. Alias, Doctor Destiny. Guilty-" They stopped, realizing they were tripping over each other's sentences, then Batman began again. "Alias, Doctor Destiny. Guilty: One count of murder in the first degree, five counts of attempted murder, and twenty-one counts of assault. Sentenced to 40 years in Arkham Asylum."

Beast Boy piped up, "Skip the charges and get to the important stuff. What can he **do**? You wouldn't have called us and Robin wouldn't be freaking out if he was just an ordinary criminal."

The Dark Knight looked at Robin. "He's not as stupid as he likes to act, is he?"

"No."

"That's right, buster-MMMFFFF!" Cyborg clapped a hand over his buddy's mouth, nodded politely to Batman. "Sorry about that, sir. You were saying?"

Starfire padded sleepily down the stairs as Raven slid back down through the ceiling, just in time to catch the Caped Crusader's reply.

"To address the little fellow's question, Dee -- or Doctor Destiny, the persona his warped mind's created-- has extremely powerful extra-sensory perception and projection. And what that lets him do is manipulate sleeping people's dreams -- and keep people asleep. He makes them live their literal worst nightmares until they go insane...then die. He killed his ex-wife that way, and tried to do the same thing to the Justice League. Almost worked."

Cyborg's jaw dropped. "Jeez! How do we fight something like that? What'd you do?"

"J'onn J'onzz and I didn't figure out what Dee was able to do until after his ex-wife was hospitalized, and even then it took us until well after midnight to determine exactly what was going on. By then, the rest of the League had gone to sleep. And that let Dee get hold of them. J'onn eventually managed to break his control over everyone but Hawkgirl. I knocked Dee out and that set her free, but it was far too close."

The half-mechanical boy frowned. "That strategy's not going to be much help here. It needs a telepath. Raven's the closest we have, but she's an _empath_. I'm not sure she'd be able to take him down."

Raven scowled. "Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence."

"Sorry, Rae, but this is something we need to be worrying about from the start."

Batman nodded. "Smart thinking. It gets worse, too. Dee's powers get stronger the closer you get to him. Within a few hundred feet, he can affect you even while you're awake."

Every single Titan gulped in unison.

"It's not nearly as strong that way, though. Find some catchy song or mantra that you can focus on, and you should be able to keep him from doing anything truly dangerous to your mind. _Frere Jacques_ worked for me."

Robin nodded. "At least that's something."

"I've got to go. Gorilla Grodd's Legion of Doom is attacking Moscow. Stay awake as long as you can, and sleep in shifts so Dee can't get you all at once. I'll send J'onn your way as soon as possible."

Batman flipped a switch and broke the connection, leaving the still very confused Titans looking at Robin for an explanation.


End file.
